City’s Safety Net on Trial Over a Baby Killed in ’07

By all accounts, Hailey Gonzalez’s life was short, impoverished and brutal. She was born in November 2005 to unwed parents living in a homeless shelter. Her mother, Marlene Medina, a foster child herself, had already lost custody of another daughter, Elizabeth, because a judge had determined that she was not fit to care for her.

When Hailey was only 2 months old, she was beaten by her father, Manuel Gonzalez, during a drunken fit, after a quarrel with her mother.

A year and a half later, Hailey’s father was in jail and her mother had begun a new relationship. But even those changes did not protect her. In the end, her mother’s new boyfriend beat Hailey to death, three months short of her second birthday.

More than six years later, a civil trial began in Brooklyn on Tuesday to determine whether New York City can be held liable for Hailey’s death. Lawyers for the girl’s estate say they hope the proceedings will cast a sharp light on the holes in the city’s safety net for abused children.

In opening arguments, a lawyer for the plaintiff said that the city’s Administration for Children’s Services made numerous mistakes that endangered Hailey’s welfare, and that may have contributed to her death.

One such mistake, the lawyer, Ilann Maazel, said, was the failure by city caseworkers to look up the criminal history of the mother’s live-in boyfriend at the time, Edwin Garcia.

Mr. Garcia had served a prison sentence in Puerto Rico for beating a different child, but caseworkers monitoring the mother’s parenting never checked his background.“Who let him in the home? A.C.S. did,” Mr. Maazel said. “They let a convicted child abuser into the house.”

The trial comes just a month after Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed a raft of reforms aimed at tightening communication between the criminal justice system and the children’s services administration. The mayor’s actions came after the death of Myls Dobson, a 4-year-old who the authorities say was tortured to death by his father’s girlfriend while he was in jail. Since then, the deaths of two other children have led to criminal charges against their mothers.

In the Dobson case, caseworkers were unaware of a pending indictment against the father, Okee Wade, when a family court judge awarded him custody of Myls. Now Mr. De Blasio’s administration is in court defending itself in a case with similar features: a vulnerable child, known to city authorities, killed not by a parent but by someone the parent had trusted.

Jennifer Coyne, a lawyer for the city, told a jury that Hailey’s mother was to blame for the death. She said Ms. Medina had hidden her boyfriend’s identity, denied living with him and lied about the beatings he gave her.

“She’s simply a liar,” Ms. Coyne said. “Period.”

Ms. Coyne told the six-person jury the city had no legal grounds for taking Hailey away from her mother, who had never been accused of abuse herself. Neither, she said, did the agency have legal authority to remove Hailey from the home solely because her mother had chosen to live with Mr. Garcia.

“This is America — you are allowed to live with anyone you want,” Ms. Coyne said.

The beating administered by her father left Hailey with a blood clot in one eye and bruises on her face. Mr. Gonzalez was convicted of assault and sent to prison.

A family court judge, Lee Elkins, gave custody of Hailey to Ms. Medina on the condition that city caseworkers would visit her every two weeks, and keep tabs on her child rearing. Mr. Maazel said Ms. Medina soon began living with Mr. Garcia and became pregnant again, giving birth to another girl in the spring of 2007.

Mr. Maazel said he would present evidence that the city caseworkers “never came anywhere close” to visiting Ms. Medina twice a month. As a result, he said, city workers missed signs that both Ms. Medina and Hailey were being physically abused by Mr. Garcia. “It was failure after failure after failure after failure,” Mr. Maazel said.On Aug. 6, 2007, Mr. Garcia became enraged at Hailey at their Staten Island apartment. He shook her violently when she would not stop crying, and smashed her head against a crib. The infant’s eyes rolled back in her head. She wheezed and foamed at the mouth. Ms. Medina gave her Tylenol and bathed her, but did not call 911 for nearly 12 hours. Hailey died a few days later.

Mr. Garcia later pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Ms. Medina served two years, after pleading guilty to second-degree manslaughter.

Ms. Coyne said caseworkers did not consider Hailey to be in danger because she was no longer living with her biological father.

“Essentially the danger to Hailey had been removed,” she said. “A.C.S., because of this, believed that Hailey was safe.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: City’s Safety Net on Trial Over a Baby Killed in ’07. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe